BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
February 06, 2005
Iron man of Minsk keeps tyranny alive
Mark Franchetti, Minsk
THE people of Belarus have long been familiar with the minutiae of Aleksandr Lukashenko's life. No television news bulletin in the former Soviet republic is complete without pictures of their authoritarian president opening a factory or haranguing a minister. His love of ice hockey is considered a matter of public interest.
Yet when Lukashenko took his mistress and sons to Austria on a luxurious skiing holiday last year, the trip was supposed to be a secret. As word leaked out, embarrassed aides claimed the president was there to meet leading western politicians.
Valery Levonevsky, a regional opposition leader, was incensed. He distributed a poem about the hardship of life in Belarus and a leaflet urging people to join a protest against "somebody going on a skiing holiday in Austria and having a good time at your expense".
Levonevsky paid a heavy penalty for his insubordination. First his son was arrested and held for two weeks; then his young daughter was briefly detained and strip-searched.
Finally, last spring, he and Alexander Vasilliev, a fellow critic of the regime, were sentenced to two years in prison for offending the president.
For months they were held in one of the country's worst remand jails, sharing a cell meant for 18 with more than 30 inmates, many of them suffering from tuberculosis. Levonevsky has since lost more than six stone and Amnesty International has declared both men prisoners of conscience.
"The truth about Belarus is it's a dictatorship," said Volodya, Levonevsky's son. "Everything is under Lukashenko's control and people live in fear. What happened to my father sent out a clear message: say anything against the president and you will be banged up."
To fly into Lukashenko's Belarus, a country of 10m people sandwiched between Russia and Poland, is to enter a Soviet time warp. Visitors joke that when you arrive you should put back your watch 30 years.
The culture shock begins at the airport in Minsk, the capital, where most of the lights are switched off to save electricity. It continues on the 30-mile road into the city. There are fewer than 30 billboards and several have been covered up after the president complained of seeing too many foreign models in Belarussian advertising.
The wide avenues of Minsk are almost empty: few Belarussians can afford a car. There are no kerbside vendors, beggars or stray dogs, and armies of workers keep the streets spotless.
The biggest hoardings feature police officers chatting to elderly women or giving flowers to children under the slogan: "We are always near". It is an ominous reminder the city is one of the most heavily policed in the world.
Lukashenko, 50, a former collective farm manager, was accused last month by Condoleezza Rice, the new American secretary of state, of turning Belarus into one of the world's six "outposts of tyranny", along with Iran, North Korea, Burma, Cuba and Zimbabwe.
A good deal of international opprobrium has accumulated since Lukashenko became president in 1994. In 1995, when a hot air balloon involved in a competition drifted into Belarussian airspace, the president had it shot down, killing the American pilot.
Three years later he ordered the eviction of a number of foreign ambassadors from their residences. When they refused to go he had their water and electricity cut off, forcing them out.
Almost all of the media have been placed under state control while the intelligence service - still known by its Soviet-era acronym, KGB - has become increasingly powerful.
Last October Lukashenko held a referendum, widely believed to have been rigged, that changed the rules to let him serve for more than two presidential terms.
While Belarussians struggle to survive on an average ?120 a month, Lukashenko recently bought himself a ?50m jet complete with gym, bedroom and shower. He will not be able to use it for a trip to America, however, since he is banned from travelling there. The same goes for several European countries.
The president has tightened his grip further since the "orange revolution" that brought the pro-western Viktor Yushchenko to power in neighbouring Ukraine. Several activists who attended the street protests there were beaten by KGB officers on their return.
Last month Mikhail Marinich, a leading opposition figure, was jailed for five years on charges of stealing computers from the American embassy - even though the embassy said it had lent them to him.
"Events in Ukraine have made him even more paranoid," said Zinaida Goncharova, the wife of Viktor Goncharov, an opposition leader who vanished with a friend nearly six years ago after leaving a Minsk bathhouse.
According to testimony from two former investigators and a KGB officer who fled the country, the men were abducted and killed by an interior ministry death squad accused of 30 political killings. Their car was apparently crushed by an armoured vehicle and buried with their bodies inside.
Increasingly fearful of growing dissent among the young,Lukashenko plans to strengthen a Soviet-era law prohibiting travel abroad without the KGB's permission.
Classes in state ideology have been introduced in schools and universities, while at least 75% of the music that radio stations play must be Belarussian.
If state television is to be believed, however, the country's youth has no wish to go abroad. Bulletins last week carried a report on children sent at state expense to ski at a local resort opened by Lukashenko.
"It's wonderful here. There is no need to travel abroad to ski," enthused one patriotic girl. Unless, she might have added, you are the president.
SOURCE:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1471912,00.html
Archive
